The Biological Component: The Popularity of Selection

Darwin's theory of evolution, especially as applied to human beings and human society, has always been recognized by historians as a key factor in the rise of the international eugenics movement. Indeed, the renowned English naturalist's theory of descent furnished the biological framework of eugenics and helped legitimize it as a political, social, and "scientific" movement—a point which eugenicists like Schallmayer never tired of emphasizing. Particularly important for understanding the intellectual origins of Schallmayer's eugenics is, however, the popularity that Darwin's theory of selection enjoyed in Germany during the four decades following its introduction. The Selektionsgedanke (principle of selection) was publicized by two of Germany's most eminent biologists, Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) and August Weismann (1834–1914), as well as by numerous self-styled Darwinian social theorists. Significant modifications of Darwin's theory by Weismann, and changes in the social meaning of Darwinian evolution during the 1880s and 1890s seemed to suggest to some that the "civilized" (white industrialized) nations of the world, and particularly the "fittest" classes of those nations (the educated middle classes), faced the danger of being overrun by the "uncivilized" and "unfit."

But what precisely was the link between Darwin's theory and the Selektionsgedanke? The answer is Darwin's mechanism of evolution, natural selection. It was this mechanism that separated the British naturalist's theory of the transmutation of species from all previous speculation on the subject.^[74] His choice of the term natural selection to describe the means by which all species evolve is testimony to the great intellectual debt Darwin owed to English animal breeders and horticulturists. Their daily experience demonstrated that domestic breeds could be improved upon by selecting useful variations found among cultivated plants and animals and breeding them for successive generations. By employing the phrase "natural selection," Darwin

wished to suggest that nature was capable of rendering change similar to but even more far-reaching than that of the breeder.^[75] Indeed, in Darwin's view nature was constantly at work selecting those organisms of a species whose variations somehow enhanced their chances for survival and procreation relative to other members of the same species. In such a manner all living forms were said to have evolved one from another. Natural selection, Darwin assumed, ensured a kind of progress in the organic realm; remove it and all development would cease.

As is generally well known, Darwin did not attempt to deal with human or social evolution in The Origin of Species . It was not until twelve years later, in 1871, that his views on the role of natural selection for human and social development were made public in The Descent of Man . Darwin's own opinions on the subject were strongly influenced by the writings of the essayist W. R. Greg, Alfred R. Wallace, and above all by his cousin, the biometrician and eugenicist Francis Galton. During the 1860s these men published several articles in which they each asserted that civilization imposed a serious restraint upon the efficacy of natural selection for humankind. They did not reach the same conclusions from this alleged fact, however. On the whole Wallace remained optimistic about the future development of the species and its social institutions; Greg and Galton were extremely pessimistic. The latter two believed that modern society's humanitarian institutions were protecting the weak, the stupid, and the "unfit" at the expense of the strong, the talented, and the "fit." Unless some way could be found to effectively compensate for civilization's curtailment of natural selection, racial decay was inevitable.^[76]

In the fifth chapter of The Descent of Man , under the section "Natural Selection as Affecting Civilized Nations," Darwin paid intellectual homage to his three fellow countrymen. John Greene has perceptively touched upon Darwin's ambivalent attitude regarding the notion of degeneration in civilized society.^[77] Like Wallace, Darwin was convinced that our moral and intellectual nature set humans above other animals and was the positive

result of natural selection. Like Galton, however, Darwin believed that humankind's moral nature impeded the continued efficacy of natural selection, and threatened to reverse all human progress.

Although Darwin was never fully able to reconcile this dilemma, he was consoled by his belief that the degenerative effects of modern culture did not go unchecked.^[78] By and large, however, Darwin stressed Galton's line of reasoning more than Wallace's and took the theory of racial degeneration seriously:

If the various checks specified in the last two paragraphs, and perhaps others as yet unknown, do not prevent the reckless, the vicious and the otherwise inferior members of society from increasing at a quicker rate than the better class of men, the nation will retrograde, as has too often occurred in the history of the world. We must remember that progress is no invariable rule. It is very difficult to say why one civilized nation rises, becomes more powerful, and spreads more widely, than another; or why the same nation progresses more quickly at one time than at another. We can only say that it depends on an increase in the actual number of the population, on the number of men endowed with high intellectual and moral faculties, as well as on their standard of excellence.^[79]

Darwin suggested a eugenic solution to the problem of degeneration though much less vigorously than Galton:

Man scans with scrupulous care the character and pedigree of his horses, cattle, and dogs before he matches them, but when it comes to his own marriage he rarely, or never takes any care. . . . Yet he might by selection do something not only for the bodily constitution and frame of his offspring, but for their intellectual and moral qualities. Both sexes ought to refrain from marriage if they are in any marked degree inferior in body or mind; but such hopes are utopian and will never be even partially realized until the laws of inheritance are thoroughly known. Everyone does a good service who aids towards this end. When the principles of breeding and inheritance are better understood, we shall not hear ignorant members of our legislature rejecting with scorn a plan for ascertaining whether or not sanguineous marriages are injurious to men.^[80]

By lending his considerable scientific authority to the idea of selective breeding, Darwin did much to aid the cause of eugenics in Europe and the United States.

Darwin's views on the importance of natural selection for organic and social evolution, as well as his casual remarks about the desirability of human breeding, did not fall on deaf ears in Germany. In the two decades following the prompt translation of the Origin into German in 1860, numerous scientific books and articles were published that touched on the great English naturalist's evolutionary theory.^[81] Although the overall reaction of the German biological community was mixed, many notable scientists such as Matthias Schleichen, Fritz Müller, Carl Gegenbauer, Ernst Haeckel, and August Weismann quickly became active supporters of evolution by means of natural selection.^[82] But of all the above-named scientists, Weismann stands out as especially important in the history of German eugenics. Not only did his "modified" version of Darwin's theory give the selection principle an even greater role in organic and social evolution than did the author of Origin himself, but Weismann's views also provided the biological underpinning of the mature eugenic doctrine of Schallmayer and other German race hygienists.^[83]

To be sure, Weismann did not begin his career with the intention of becoming champion of the "Neo-Darwinian" direction in biology. Trained both in medicine and zoology, the Freiburg embryologist eventually came to his position regarding the "all-sufficiency" of selection through his work on heredity. His developmental studies on insects, crustacea, and most importantly, his investigation of sex cells of the Hydromedusa during metagenesis made him extremely skeptical about the possibility of any organism being able to transmit characteristics acquired during its lifetime to the next generation. Darwin, it should be noted, found it necessary to incorporate an ever-increasing amount of so-called Lamarckian elements into the later editions of his Origin .^[84] There were simply too many phenomena in organic nature which natural selection appeared unable to explain. In order to answer his many critics, Darwin introduced a

wide variety of Lamarckian elements such as climate, food, and use and disuse of parts into the speciation process.^[85] Weismann, although not the first to contest the inheritance of these Lamarckian factors, provided a viable theory and mechanism of heredity that appeared to render such factors not only superfluous but indeed impossible.

In his investigations Weismann noted that differentiation occurring in the production of all metazoa resulted in two types of cells, the reproductive and the somatic.^[86] The big question remained: how could the first differentiation be explained? When a protozoan—a simple reproductive cell—divides, the result is two reproductive cells. How could a one-celled organism have given birth to a nonreproductive cell? For Weismann, the answer was found in the germ plasm. Variations in the original reproductive cell or groups of cells—that is, differences in their molecular or chemical structure—could upon division create not just the expected reproductive cells but nonreproductive ones as well. If this variation proved to be advantageous to the organism, it would be preserved by natural selection.^[87] Assuming that part of the hereditary material of this varied reproductive cell remained unaltered, it could be passed down to future generations.

In short, what Weismann suggested in his first pamphlet on the subject, On Heredity (1883), and developed more fully in his later writings was the transmission of a hereditary substance through a "continuous and distinct tract" beginning with the very origin of life and proceeding from one generation to another. This "germ-tract," insofar as it occupied a "different sphere" from the somaplasm, was totally unaffected by what happens to the organism during its life.^[88] Certain important revisions notwithstanding, this was the basis of Weismann's famous mechanism of heredity, "the continuity of the germ-plasm"—a theory wholeheartedly embraced by Schallmayer once it became known to him.

Weismann's theory emphatically excluded the possibility of an inheritance of acquired characteristics. If all changes in phy-

logenetic development occurred through alterations in the germ-plasm uninfluenced by any bodily changes in the organism, neither the environment, the use or disuse of parts, nor indeed any other factor besides natural selection itself, could be of any significance for the evolutionary process. Moreover, Weismann maintained, there was no reason to accept an unproven hypothesis which was not even necessary for the theory of descent.^[89] Even the existence of rudimentary organs, a perplexing phenomenon facing Darwin and one which he believed was only explicable in terms of disuse, could, according to the Freiburg embryologist, be satisfactorily explained without recourse to Lamarckian factors. In an attempt to explain the existence of rudimentary organs Weismann proposed his theory of Panmixie . The theory sought to account for the degeneration of an organ by means of the "suspension of the preserving influence of natural selection."^[90] He offered the following example of birds of prey:

The sharp sight of these birds is maintained by means of the continued operation of natural selection, by which the individuals with the weakest sight are being continually exterminated. But all this would be changed at once, if a bird of prey of a certain species was compelled to live in absolute darkness. The quality of the eyes would then be immaterial, for it could make no difference to the existence of the individual, or the maintenance of the species. The sharp sight might, perhaps, be transmitted through numerous generations; but when weaker eyes arose from time to time, these would also be transmitted, for even short-sighted or imperfect eyes would bring no disadvantage to their owner. Hence, by continual crossing between individuals with the most varied degrees of perfection in this respect, the average perfection would generally decline from the point attained before the species lived in the dark.^[91]

In his magnum opus, Vorträge über Deszendenztheorie , Weismann went on to cite Panmixie, in conjunction with his principle of "Germinal Selection," as responsible for the short-sightedness and for the deterioration of the mammary glands in all classes of people, and for the weakness of muscles among

members of the upper classes in modern civilization.^[92] In his major treatise Schallmayer utilized both Weismann's example and his language to demonstrate both the possibility and the reality of racial degeneration.

In addition to the scientific reception of Darwin by eminent German biologists such as Weismann, the British naturalist's theory enjoyed an enthusiastic popular reception. As has been discussed at length in Alfred Kelly's extremely useful study, the rapid popularization of Darwin and Darwinism in Germany (indeed to the point where it became a sort of popular philosophy) was aided by, among other things, the country's strong popular science tradition.^[93] As early as the 1870s such Darwinian terms as Kampf ums Dasein (struggle for survival) had "penetrated middle-class consciousness," and by the 1890s certain segments of the German working class had also become familiar with the basic tenets of Darwinism.^[94] It is perhaps not an exaggeration to say that Darwin was more popular in the land of Goethe and Kant than in his native country.

One of the best known German popularizers of Darwin, and the most significant for Schallmayer's intellectual development, was the combative and controversial Jena marine biologist, Ernst Haeckel. In his address to the annual conference of the Association of German Scientists and Physicians in 1863 at Stettin, a speech viewed by Kelly as "the public debut of German Darwinism," Haeckel went far beyond the usually cautious Darwin in discussing the broader implications of the new theory.^[95] Unlike Darwin, who, in his Origin , did not discuss human evolution for fear of criticism, Haeckel immediately included human beings as the end point of a long evolutionary chain connecting protozoan to people. Throughout his life—in his numerous popular texts and public lectures—Haeckel never tired of fleshing out the larger philosophical and social meaning of Darwinism. The Jena zoologist's rather dubious philosophical system, monism, was a direct outgrowth of his Darwinian outlook.^[96]

For Haeckel, as his international bestseller Näturliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (The History of Creation) makes clear, Darwinism

was synonymous with selection. It was, after all, Darwin's mechanism, natural selection, that revealed the "natural causes of organic development."^[97] Prior to Darwin, perceptive biologists knew that some form of species transformation had taken place but they lacked any viable means of explaining it. Moreover, selection not only was responsible for evolution but also accounted for the alleged "Law of Progress,"^[98] an idea Haeckel probably borrowed from Herbert Spencer.^[99] Indeed Haeckel, like Spencer, equated evolution with progress; but whereas the latter viewed natural selection as just one of many factors responsible for progressive development, Haeckel singled out Darwin's principle as the most important, if not the sole engine of forward-directed organic and social change.

Yet Haeckel, like Darwin, also recognized that progress could be impeded, at least temporarily, by certain counterselective institutions in modern society which seemed to eliminate the "fit" and protect the "unfit." Modern military service and, by extension, contemporary warfare, were examples of such ominous institutions. For Haeckel,

this and other forms of artificial selection practised in our civilized states sufficiently explain the sad fact that, in reality, weakness of the body and weakness of character are on the perpetual increase among civilized nations, and that, together with strong, healthy bodies, free and independent spirits are becoming more and more scarce.^[100]

Another factor working against progressive development was medicine:

The progress of modern medical science, although still little able really to cure diseases, yet possesses and practises more than it used to do the art of prolonging life during lingering, chronic diseases for many years. Such ravaging evils as consumption, scrofula, syphilis, and also many forms of mental disorders, are transmitted by sickly parents to some of their children, or even to the whole of their descendants. Now, the longer the diseased parents, with medical assistance, can drag on their sickly existence, the more numerous are the descendants who will inherit incurable evils, and the greater will

be the number of individuals, again, in the succeeding generation, thanks to that artificial medical selection who will be infected by their parents with lingering, hereditary disease.^[101]

But despite the counterselective tendencies of medicine and the military—tendencies which Schallmayer later bemoaned even more forcefully—Haeckel remained optimistic; natural selection, "the strongest lever for progress and amelioration," he maintained, will triumph over all attempts by human society to limit its action.^[102]

Insofar as Haeckel believed that struggle and selection were the major forces driving human history, he was not merely a popularizer of Darwin but was also a social Darwinist. Yet Haeckel's brand of liberal, optimistic social Darwinism was not Schallmayer's. Whereas the social Darwinism espoused by Haeckel, Spencer, and German social theorist Albert Schaeffle stressed the necessity of social progress and functioned more or less as a justification of the naturalness of a laissez-faire competitive society, a later variety did not. By the late 1880s and 1890s the necessitarian optimism that had been the hallmark of early social Darwinism began to dissipate, leaving a form that emphasized not the necessity but only the possibility of social progress. Instead of resting comfortably in the assurance that evolution would in the long run perfect humankind's physical, mental, and moral faculties, many late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century social Darwinists like Schallmayer denied the inevitability of such progress in the absence of some kind of conscious control over the reproductive capabilities of the "fit" and "unfit."^[103]

There are, to be sure, several reasons for this growing pessimism regarding the inevitability of social progress and the growing demand that the state take an active role in regulating the nation's level of biological fitness, not the least of which was a general disillusionment in Germany with economic liberalism after the 1870s. Although the Great Depression period did not spell the end of economic growth, entrepreneurs did indeed find it more difficult to succeed during this time than they had in the

past. Economic uncertainty unleased widespread social dissatisfaction and a growing tendency to embrace aggressively ideological political positions, particularly with regard to the proper social distribution of the allegedly dwindling national income. More generally, the economic slowdown resulted in an all-too-exaggerated malaise on the part of the German middle-classes. Bismarck's turn toward protectionism and his support of social legislation in the 1880s in part reflected this pessimistic psychological climate.^[104]

This climate of social pessimism explains, at least partly, Weismann's appeal for social Darwinists after 1880. Along with Darwin, first-generation social Darwinists assumed that new characteristics acquired by an organism as a result of environmental change would be transmitted to future generations. This suggested, at least implicitly, that humankind's physical and mental traits could be improved by environmental changes. Weismann's theories, however, denied that such external influences could affect an individual's hereditary substance. The implication, for those predisposed to believe it for other reasons, was that the germ-plasm alone determined the fate of the individual and, by extension, that of the nation and race.^[105] Since, as had been maintained by many, natural selection was no longer effectively able to weed out the bad or "unfit" germ-plasm (owing to the numerous cultural institutions hampering its operation), some form of human selection was necessary. As one German social Darwinist and race hygienist put it:

It was Weismann's teaching regarding the separation of the germ-plasm from the soma, the hereditary stuff from the body of the individual, that first allowed us to recognize the importance of Darwin's principle of selection. Only then did we comprehend that it is impossible to improve our progeny's condition by means of physical and mental training. Apart from the direct manipulation of the nucleus, only selection can preserve and improve the race.^[106]

Indeed for social Darwinists of the second generation—those who accepted Weismann's views on heredity and the "all-su-

premacy" of selection—eugenics was often seen as both a logical and necessary strategy to avert racial degeneration. In short, Weismann's theories provided the necessary biological justification for race hygiene.^[107]

Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century social Darwinism, the German medical tradition, and the Bildungsbürger's concern over the social question—these were the three most important influences responsible for Schallmayer's turn to eugenics. He attempted to grapple with the social problems resulting from Germany's rapid and thoroughgoing industrialization, he accepted the professional and intellectual norms fostered by the German medical community, and he embraced the "selectionist" variety of social Darwinism then fashionable among certain German biologists and self-styled social theorists. The impact of these contexts are immediately visible in Schallmayer's university education, medical training, early professional career, and first treatise.